Slavoj ?? i ?? ek – Biography of Slavoj ?? i ?? ek

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Slavoj ?? i ?? ek is a contemporary Slovenian philosopher best known for his political theory and cultural criticism, although he also made an important contribution to theoretical psychoanalysis and film theory. At the moment, Zizek is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy of the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, but is also a Professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities at the University of London and President of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in Ljubljana . A member of the Slovenian Academy of Art Sciences since 2005, he is visiting professor at a number of universities around the world, including Princeton University, Columbia University, the London Consortium and many others.

?? i ?? ek attracted international attention in the late 1980s when he published his first book in English. He is considered by many to be one of the best global thinkers. However, he has also caused much controversy, by what some consider a “Borat of philosophy” and a dangerous agitator of Marxism. The philosophy of ?? i ?? ek she is most often seen as a Lacanian Hegelian, but the influence of the Marxist concept cannot be overlooked.

?? i ?? ek He was born on March 21, 1949 in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, which at that time was part of Yugoslavia. He spent much of his childhood in the coastal city of Portoro ??. His parents returned to the Slovenian capital when he was a teenager and enrolled him in a prestigious secondary school in Ljubljana. ?? i ?? ek continued his education at the University of Ljubljana, where he studied philosophy and sociology. After receiving his doctorate, he went to Paris where he studied psychoanalysis.

Despite ?? i ?? ek studied philosophy during the era of Yugoslavia’s liberalization, he was greatly influenced by his teacher, the Slovenian Marxist philosopher Bo ?? idar Debenjak. The latter was a professor at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana, where he taught German idealism and Karl Marx’s Capital from the Hegelian perspective (Georg Hegel’s philosophy).

In the early 1970s, ?? i ?? ek he became an assistant researcher at the University of Ljubljana and was promised tenure. However, shortly after, the communist regime eliminated liberal leaders from all over Yugoslavia, including the then Socialist Republic of Slovenia. As a result of the tightening of the regime and the teaching work of ?? i ?? ek being evaluated as anti-Marxist, he lost his position at said University.

In 1977, after being unemployed for four years, ?? i ?? ek he found a job at the Slovenian Marxist Center where he worked as a recording clerk. At that time he also came into contact with a group of scholars who introduced him to the theories of Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who had a great influence on his later work. In the late 1970s, he returned to the University of Ljubljana and was hired by the Institute of Sociology.

In the late 1980s, ?? i ?? ek it attracted a lot of attention both inside and outside the country. At home, she gained a lot of publicity as a columnist for the alternative magazine called Mladina (“Youth”), which was criticized by the communist regime. ?? i ?? ek, who was a member of the Communist Party (like most academics and intellectuals at the time) returned his membership in protest, due to the so-called JBTZ trial. It was a trial against two journalists from Mladina, the editor of the magazine and a sergeant of the Yugoslav People’s Army for treason against military secrets in 1988. ?? i ?? ek He was actively involved in political and civil movements for democratization and even ran for the presidency of the Republic of Slovenia in the first free elections in 1990.

On the international scene, ?? i ?? ek drew attention in the late 1980s with his book The sublime object of ideology and established himself as one of the most influential contemporary social theorists and philosophers.

Although he actively participated in the democratization process of Slovenia, ?? i ?? ek he is committed to the communist idea and describes himself as a “radical leftist” and “communist in a qualified sense.” His political ideas and criticism of existing political and economic systems caused great controversy in intellectual circles, on the one hand, and earned him the title of one of the most prominent thinkers of modern times and celebrity status on the other. .

His works are largely influenced by German idealism, especially by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Immanuel Kant, as well as by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. But his theories also reveal a great influence of Marxism.